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On the list for the spiffy new Hermès opening this month: a world-renowned burn surgeon.

“He’s a genius,” says Jennifer Carter, the dynamo who brought the luxury brand to Canada 25 years ago and whose life’s work is entering a gleaming, new, orange-burst phase.

Showing her flair with an anecdote, and a skill in pulling a certain gallows humour out of her Birkin, she’s talking about one Dr. Marc Jeschke, the German-bred director of the Ross Tilley Burn Centre at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. A stroke of misfortune with a barbecue this past summer led her to the specialist — as a silicon-assisted cast on Carter’s right arm reminds — and the least she could do, she says, is invite the doctor and his wife to the private party she happens to be presiding over soon.

It’s an opening that’s made socializers so thirsty that many plainly uninvited are RSVPing anyway, an old trick that evidently never stales. It’s set to bring out several members of the many-fingered Dumas clan, the storied French family behind the Hermès label, including its current CEO Axel, a sixth-generation Dumas.

C’est fabuleux.

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“Bricks from Denmark,” Carter murmurs at one point, starting to describe the two-storey, 6,000-square-foot retail space that’s expected to be the biggest shape-shifter in some time for a stretch of Bloor that really has no peer in the nation. The facade, she confirms — cloaked for months behind way-chic hoarding — was the most challenging part of the move from its outpost farther west to a new flagship situated in a vast aerie once occupied by both Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn.

“Two masons. They’re local. Four months to build. Getting the bricks here. And you have to get the steel . . . very precise. I know too much about all this,” she continues with a tiny laugh.

I joke that the process almost sounds akin to the much-ado craftsmanship that goes into the making of a single, made-to-order Hermès bag, sewn by hand in one of the ateliers of the 180-year-old fashion house with a classic saddle stitch, one that reportedly takes anywhere from 15 to 20 hours to complete. Carter does not disagree.

A warm, buoyant fashion constant in this town, her enthusiasm prickles and her bio intrigues: from the Havergal College good girl who grew up here to the burst of youth spent in L.A. (linked with a beau who was “a back-up drummer for Aerosmith”) to a drive-by stint in investment banking to the quick-thinking gumption that led her to partnering with Hermès in this town (and also owning the Saint Laurent footprint here for a while). No pushover, she.

“We started together,” the now-president of Hermès Canada says, name-dropping Jean-Louis Dumas, Axel’s legendary uncle, the company’s chief from 1978 to 2006. The day she started with the company was her 33rd birthday and, by the time they’d moved into their maiden store on Bloor in 1992, she remembers his answer to a question from a journalist when asked when he expected to “start making money” in Toronto. “We don’t look at it that way,” Dumas said. “We plant the seeds. And the tree grows.”

And that “strategic vision,” Carter says, has never shifted.

“Quality, not quantity.” “Hyper-local.” “Family-Oriented.” Some of the additional descriptors that roll out of her in describing the ethos of the brand.

“In those days, silk was 40 to 50 per cent of the business” (scarves, essentially), she elaborates, when I ask about the changing metabolism of the local market. “If we sold a handbag in a month . . . we’d open Champagne!”

This was, of course, before the “it” handbag craze erupted in earnest in the late 1990s/early aughts. Also, from the lens of an era now — a time in which luxury has become democratized in the hands of conglomerates — the privately owned Hermès stands out even more as a steady purveyor of quiet refinement.

And though long connected to the annals of fashion history — a pregnant Grace Kelly, for one, used a certain Hermès bag to shield her belly from the paparazzi shortly after she’d wed Prince Rainier of Monaco, after which it was christened the “Kelly Bag” — this was also long before Hermès entered the lexicon of pop culture in a whole other super-amped way. Before Samantha started hyperventilating about Birkin bags on Sex and the City, before Rory got gifted one by a schmoozy suitor on a memorable episode of Gilmore Girls, before Martha Stewart famously arm-candied one on the court steps of her insider trading trial.

But back to 2017 and the new boutique: add to it a grand-i-fied Chanel that just opened on Yorkville Ave., and currently gestating vaults in the form of a new Dior and a fresh Jimmy Choo, and it all adds up to a luxing up of the area around the “Mink Mile.”

Inside the Hermès foothold, specifically, comes a “leather universe,” destined to take up the windowed expanse of the upper level, looking down on Bloor. Also on that level, a dedicated space that will be introducing, for the first time to Toronto, Hermès’ home range, including furniture and lighting, and rounding out with wallpaper, textiles, tableware, objets d’art. To the right, on the first level, you’ll find fashion accessories, jewellery, a full range of fragrances, a men’s playground, as well as a swirling silk department (given pride of place, extending both left and right of the entrance).

What has Carter most excited, perhaps, is the stunning oval staircase that’s doubling as the artery of the boutique. Paved in white marble, encompassed in cherry wood and burnished with a leather rail, it’s destined to become one of Toronto’s most Instagrammable.

“You either do a staircase that you don’t notice or you do a staircase that’s truly sensational,” she says, confirming that she consulted closely with the Parisian architectural firm RDAI that’s behind the project: the firm that is also working on a new built-to-suit Hermès in Vancouver, projected to open in another couple of years.

Whether she’s talking stairs or bricks, there is a palpable relish in Carter, not to mention a sign of the girl who, at her “confirmation” years ago, received an Hermès scarf from her parents.

“They knew!” she says. “Everyone else in my class got a cross or a Bible . . . but I got an Hermès scarf!”

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